The Faces of Intelligence

The third activity—namely additional processing for the intelligence assessment team—is about organizing and presenting the daily traffic of pre-screened items that are potentially valuable, either by subject or topical area. Assessment team members have tools for summarizing, grading and presenting such items. As they complete the analysis, their selections are provisioned to consumers, providing the most important information from the day's traffic for each subject.

Communicating intelligence. To minimize training and maximize reach, almost all of today's assessment and early-warning products present a ubiquitous interface via a conventional Web browser.

A critical component in the successful implementation of the intelligence cycle is the ability to quickly publish intelligence to consumers. The traditional media and publishing companies create networks of informed decision makers to run an effective intelligence system. In this respect, designers and managers of intelligence operations always balance the need for security and privilege against the force of Metcalfe's Law which states that the usefulness of a network increases with the number of users.

Improving the Intelligence Process
There are several points of enduring strain in the intelligence process described above. The common underlying factors are the importance of time in the analytic process and the unmanageable, irreversible flow of time itself. The former directly impacts the quality of intelligence. The latter determines the productivity of an intelligence system.

At a high level, the core primitives, or analyses, inherent in modern information intelligence are:

• Reconnaissance: recognizing and identifying persons, places, and other entities;
• Pattern: identifying similarities across intelligence items;
• Intensity: recognizing the frequency and correlation of concepts;
• Intention: measuring intelligence for evidence of sentiment, opinion, threat, etc.;
• Traffic: calculating and analyzing these four factors, as they change over time; and
• Early warning: notifying members of an intelligence network, based upon the occurrence of an event, or receipt of particular information.

Performing and presenting the results of these analyses automatically reduces the strain of time for consumers and analysts by minimizing time spent just looking or gathering facts unproductively. The time saved with integrated intelligence produces an additional benefit. It is axiomatic in the fields of intelligence and cognitive psychology, that more time spent on reflection, creating and testing hypotheses and building associations between related ideas produces better analysis.

One way to reduce the "strain of time" is to address the complexity and effort spent in navigating through potentially meaningful items. Tools that allow intelligence- gathering teams to spend less time finding meaningful results are high-value additions to any intelligence team. For example, tools that can discover additional patterns, concepts, entities, events, etc. and allow analysts to explore the facets in various directions would be tremendously helpful. With technologies that dynamically extract and present entities from a group of related items, teams can typically reduce the time expended in their effort by more than 50%. Bottom line—more efficient discovery improves quality and productivity.

Survival of the Fittest
Everyone remembers where he or she was when something groundbreaking happened. Such events have a tendency to shake us, shape us and swamp us in a deluge of information. There are a few among us who are able to take advantage of the flood of information pouring from many sources. The ability to intelligently anticipate and monitor the resulting upheaval in those striking moments can mean the difference between survival and dissolution.

The pace of change—from political, market and competitive forces—has only accelerated over the last 25 years. Today, groundbreaking events happen almost regularly on a global, national, market or organizational level. In a true Darwinian sense, the forces of change "select" successful organizations based upon their ability to recognize change and adapt.

Avoiding disruptive change through the careful and timely analysis of relevant information has become the defining benefit of every intelligent organism and intelligence- organization system in operation today. Every organization in public or private sectors must learn to gather, process and use information more efficiently if it is to survive and prosper. The outcome of today's wars—whether waged in the marketplace or between nations—hinges upon the effective production and consumption of intelligence. There is no mercy for the uninformed or unprepared. Destiny will reward those prepared to learn and to inform. The question is simple—are you adequately prepared?

FAST Solutions
Historically, the commercial tools available for intelligence analysis carried significant transaction costs—natural consequences of the strains of time and analysis. As a result, many organizations have under-invested in their internal intelligence efforts.

However, that is changing as new, innovative solutions hit the market. Fast Search & Transfer for instance, has a solution that integrates the entire life cycle of "intelligence gathering-analysis-communication" primitives into a scalable, high-performance content refinery. FAST's Intelligence Solution—FAST Marketrac™—gathers, analyzes and communicates intelligence from multiple, distributed data sources. Designed as search-driven solution that extends the architecture and function of FAST Enterprise Search Platform, FAST Marketrac offers a dramatic reduction in the lifecycle costs associated with intelligence systems.

FAST Marketrac can accelerate and extend intelligence gathering by integrating content from any source, anywhere. It can analyze patterns and extract meaning to improve intelligence analysis, and communicate actionable intelligence to the decision makers on a timely basis via a realtime filtering and alerting engine. The solution embeds seamlessly into intranet, portal and other browser-based user interfaces—providing the greatest possible leverage for intelligence analysis and operations.